One Georgian’s crusade to clean the voter rolls spurs a lawsuit

News

A Georgia man is doing his part to keep the voter rolls clean. Or he's a guy with too much time on his hands.

Either way, someone named Lawrence Hoskins is a central figure in the latest voting rights lawsuit in the Peach State. He appears on page 14 of a 195-page complaint filed by civil rights groups against the Board of Registration and Elections in DeKalb County, a decidedly Democratic slice of Atlanta and its suburbs to the east.

The suit, filed Wednesday in federal court, alleges the election officials violated federal law and constitutional voting rights protections by failing to do enough to confirm the registration information of more than 50 people and then notify them before they were dropped from the rolls in the past two years.

Hoskins' role is perfectly legal under state law, which permits a registered voter to challenge another person's voting qualifications by filing a written complaint with a county.

Illinois should host the first presidential primaries if the goal is to pick a state that most closely matches the demographics of the country.

And Vermont, the home state of Democratic front-runner Bernie Sanders, should have minimal influence over the process because its makeup is least similar to the entire United States — meaning the results from that state would be hardly at all predictive of the nation's views.

Those are among the conclusions out Thursday from the personal financial services website Wallet Hub, which has been churning out a series of reports this winter hoping to point political leaders toward helpful data for picking candidates in a more democratically sustainable way.

Two more solidly red states are moving closer this week to enacting a photo ID requirement for voting starting this fall.

The Republican-majority state House in Missouri gave initial approval to such a bill Wednesday. The GOP state House in Kentucky is expected to clear a measure by Friday, with enough votes to override a potential veto.

Only 18 states now require people to present an identification card with a picture on it at the polls, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, and such rules have become one of the more highly contentious parts of the democracy reform debate in recent years.

Advocates for ranked-choice voting have picked up a crucially important ally. The New York Times, which has one of the most influential editorial pages in the country, issued a full endorsement Thursday of the most popular alternative to the current voting system.

Under the simple headline "The Primaries Are Just Dumb," the Times laid out a compelling case for both political partied to embrace RCV in their presidential primaries four years from now.

Debate

"The current primary and caucus schedule only exists because the states that hold the first contests are not willing to give up that power," argue Corinne Day and Anthony Lamorena of R Street Institute.